text:
October 2012
24 posts
Many of the startup companies we work with have built incredible cultures and teams. Cultures that are quirky, fun-loving, hardworking, energetic and adventurous. Teams that are tight-knit, creative, dedicated and happy. While there are a thousand words we could use to describe the characteristics of each company's culture, we all know what a picture is worth.
Photographs can tell you more about a company's culture and their team experience than any lengthy blog post we could ever write. So we decided to ask some of the innovative startups we work with:
Send us a photo that best represents your company culture, and tell us why.
We share their awesome responses below so you can get a glimpse of the inner lives of ten iDoneThis musers companies.
1. Kitchensurfing is an online community and global marketplace connecting private, professional chefs with food enthusiasts everywhere.
"Kitchensurfing is a worldwide community of chefs and people that love to cook. Our customers love inviting our chefs into their homes and offices for special events and meals with friends and family. But! The Kitchensurfing team also loves doing right by our chefs. Everyone's heard of Christmas in July, so the KS team decided to cook Thanksgiving in June for a dozen or so of our most active chefs. We roasted a turkey (hard to find in June!) and had a full array of sides. We're fortunate enough to have an office that doubles as a test kitchen.
I'm one of the founders and CEO in the blue-checked shirt (the solo shot of me needs to be credited to Peter Hobbs). The gentleman that's excessively excited about the turkey is our community director, Max Siegal, who cooked the turkey. The multi-person shot shows our little dining room, some KS staff, and a few of our chefs."
Chris Muscarella
Co-Founder & CEO, Kitchensurfing
2. Olark is an easy-to-install service that enables you to chat live with any visitor to your site.
"Yes, this is at our OFFICE. We do things a bit differently here at Olark… Redwood trees, gymnastic rings, team lunches, and a cat that runs the meetings between our Palo Alto and Ann Arbor offices. It's all in the name of building the best live chat software around (sorry we weren't able to share the photos of our top secret control center)."
Roland Osborne
Co-founder, Olark
3. LKR Social Media is a team of online marketing whizzes that trains small businesses to leverage social media.
"We don't have an office, but we do meet up for in-person retreats at least once per year. Here's a snapshot from our latest retreat that was held in the Ace Hotel in New York City. I like this picture because it shows our value of not taking ourselves too seriously. Our customers come to us because they want social media to be easy, not a complicated burden. We try to keep things fun and light to take away from our customer's stress, not add to it!"
Laura Roeder
Founder, LKR Social Media
4. TravelPod helps users create an online travel blog, upload photos from their phone while on the road and participate in travel challenges.
"We work hard and we play hard."
Luc Levesque
Founder & GM, TravelPod
5. EZTable is a 24/7 online reservation platform for diners and restauranteurs that started in Taiwan and is expanding.
"EZTABLE focuses on customers. The biggest mission is to figure out what the customer needs. "Hack, everything" is what we believe and we learn hard from failures. Without failures, no successes."
Alex Chen
Co-Founder & CEO, EZTable
6. SocialToaster helps you engage and empower your fans to share your social media content.
"SocialToaster has a dynamic, fast-paced, energetic culture that embraces the work-hard/play-hard mentality. We take great pride in the closeness of our team. We regularly participate in extra-curricular activities outside of the office… And although the size of our lunch table has grown into a lengthy "Hogwarts style" table in recent months, we still try to eat together everyday.
The SocialToaster environment, and associated culture, is truly the envy of Baltimore. Not only does our team work hard and play hard together, inside (and outside) the office. But our office is somewhat of a playground, as well - with a velour room (company lounge area with velour couches and coffee tables), eclectic renovated warehouse office space, and am onsite pool and hot-tub."
Brian Razzaque
Founder & CEO, SocialToaster
7. Alton Lane customizes men's clothing to fit your exact measurements and personalized style online.
"At Alton Lane we are always evolving with our customers and their individual and collective experience as our most important guide. The only way to achieve this is to empower and supply our team of amazing people with tools that assist them in being more efficient. We value creativity, innovation and fun in everything we do and believe that communicating across teams allows us to break down information silos and concentrate our efforts in the most effective ways."
Colin Hunter
CEO, Alton Lane
8. ShopLocket is an easy-to-use e-commerce site that lets you sell anything from anywhere.
"At ShopLocket we work hard and we ping pong hard. Staying tight-knit is very important to us. You have to hire the right people, someone that you're willing to be with for long, long hours. And someone that's good at ping pong."
Dan Kalmar
Community Manager, ShopLocket
9. FreeAgent is a stress-free, simple accounting solution for small businesses and freelancers.
"We're very proud of our team here at FreeAgent. Not only are they an awesome, friendly bunch of people, but they're also the reason why our business is going from strength to strength - and that's why we're committed to keeping them happy.
But it's not just the Aeron chairs, Herman Miller desks and Apple Macs that we give all of our staff that creates a happy office culture. Nor is it our shiny Edinburgh office with its fridge full of soft drinks and beer, or the fact that we pay for everyone's lunch each Friday. Rather, it's because we've built an environment where people actually want to share their talents, support each other and make FreeAgent the best cloud accounting system for small businesses and freelancers worldwide.
We love the camaraderie that runs through FreeAgent: not only in our headquarters, but across all of our staff working remotely in the UK and the USA. Whether its our Edinburgh-based engineers hot-desking to develop new features - or our developers hooking up over Skype to solve problems - it's great to see dozens of exceptionally talented people working together and having fun doing so."
Olly Headey
Co-Founder & CTO, FreeAgent
10. Springest makes it easy to find and compare online educational programs for personal and professional development.
"Here's a picture of our balcony a few months ago during a Ruby Hack Night we held with about 40 Ruby developers. It shows 5 Springest guys working on PingPongGuru for ranking and displaying our ping pong results… But of course there's beer and a nice view of early 17th century buildings along the canals of Amsterdam. It shows our open culture and especially our drive to always share numbers about performance. iDoneThis does for our normal operation what PingPongGuru and our hack nights do for ping pong ;)."
Ruben Timmerman
Founder & CEO, Springest
Looking at all these photos reminds of me of something I once read, that humans across cultures and generations can tell a fake smile from a real smile. This is because of the orbicularis oculi muscles, located near the outer corner of the eyes. Those muscles cannot be voluntarily moved, and thus a forced smile is always discernible from an emotionally honest smile.
The same could be said of company culture. Bells, whistles and office amenities aside, you can't fake or force employee happiness and engagement. And as many of these photos show, it's those employee smiles that are the proud focal point for our muser companies and what drive their success.
Now it's high time we shot our iDoneThis team photo!
Ginni Chen is the Chief Happiness Officer at iDoneThis. When not striving for the happiness of iDoneThis members, she's a rock climbing instructor, skier and collector of first edition books. You should follow her on Twitter at @GinniChen.
Sarah Hepola, on the weight of to-do lists.
VHX is bringing digital video distribution up to speed with this internet-fueled modern age, delivering DRM-free video, such as Aziz Ansari's Dangerously Delicious and Indie Game: The Movie, directly to fans. Having launched as a social video community — a way to discover, share, and queue video for later — VHX could soon be seeing their distribution platform and consumption community interact in interesting ways down the road.
We talked with co-founder, Jamie Wilkinson, who describes how the timing felt right for VHX's push to help small filmmakers and artists self-distribute their work: "It really helps leverage all the growth we've seen in social media for people to actually financially support themselves outside of the old studio distribution model. For filmmakers, it's really great because we don't take any rights restrictions or exclusivity, so we push things to market super fast and work in a way where every project is individualized and has a bespoke solution."
Jamie also appreciates the bespoke solution that iDoneThis provides for the VHX team, with its flexibility regarding entries and settings. "Everybody uses it differently and it's interesting seeing just how it's evolved as people use it more." For Jamie, iDoneThis's most important function is providing talking points for the next morning. "It's been really good just in terms of thinking about what will get accomplished that day."
The VHX team is in the process of expanding (calling all hand models!). Jamie explains how, with the company centered in New York and remote team members like himself, "we lean really heavily on tools to make sure that everybody is up to sync all the time. I have a lot of experience, especially with open-source software development, so I know how critical it is having good communication lines."
iDoneThis is one communication tool among many that VHX uses, including email, HipChat, Google Hangouts, Asana, and Github. "It's a question of having a good Swiss Army knife." Jamie elaborates on how one tool shouldn't try to do everything, that instead, "it works having a Unix style, having small tools that do certain things really well." iDoneThis is the small but powerful tool that keeps everybody in the loop. "With the chat, you're going to miss things and you shouldn't be expected to see everything necessarily. With project management tools, it's more static, and you kind of tune it out because there's so much activity."
Many of us grapple with the challenge of navigating the relentless stream of information and activity at work. Jamie sees our daily digest feature as a great solution for dealing with the flood. "iDoneThis's daily digest model has been really great because it's a summary of what has been done and it gives you a high-level view. It's exactly how start-ups probably should be run and how we try to run [VHX]. I think there are almost lessons for services like Twitter. I mean, they finally started pushing out these digest-like highlight emails that I think most people turn off, but if it's something you know is important, you pay really close attention to your inbox and you'll pay attention to everything that you're looking at."
We're proud to serve as one of the handy tools on VHX's swiss army knife of work solutions, helping VHX democratize the world of digital video!
I've noticed an interesting phenomenon among productive people: they often overlook their own productivity. The more productive you are, the more likely you are to get down on yourself and think at the end of the day, "I wasn't very productive today."
Because ambitious people measure themselves by their progress towards achieving audacious goals, they often can't appreciate a single day's worth of tiny, incremental advancements that they've made. Plus, the fuller your day is with activity, the harder it seems to pinpoint what exactly it is that you did at all.
Between starting Netscape, Opsware, Ning, and Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen has done monumental work in his career and seems particularly at risk to fall into this trap. To arm himself against the daunting imperative of making meaningful progress toward his big objectives, Marc came up with a system: the Anti-Todo List. It's his way to stop and recognize his own accomplishments, measured not by a project's impressive success, but in increments, to fuel his motivation for getting stuff done day after day.
What you do is this: every time you do something — anything — useful during the day, write it down in your Anti-Todo List on the card.
Each time you do something, you get to write it down and you get that little rush of endorphins that the mouse gets every time he presses the button in his cage and gets a food pellet.
And then at the end of the day, … take a look at today's card and its Anti-Todo list and marvel at all the things you actually got done that day.
Note that he's advocating for more than crossing items off your to-do list. His Anti-Todo List gives him credit for everything he gets done, not just what's preordained by his to-do list. And keeping a separate list means that when you take stock of what you've achieved, you aren't hounded by what's still left to do.
There's value gained from the act of slowing down to write down accomplishments, which is inaccessible without acknowledgment. It turns out that "being able to put more notches on my accomplishment belt, so to speak, by writing down things on my Anti-Todo list as I accomplish them throughout the day makes me feel marvelously productive and efficient[,] [f]ar more so than if I just did those things and didn't write them down."
Rather than waiting for a major milestone to celebrate an achievement, recognize that tiny, wonderful triumphs happen every single day. Turn that into a daily process of rejuvenation and inspiration after a hard-day's work, and you'll have added a crucial ingredient to your day that maintains the positive emotional balance necessary to accomplishing great things.
Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia, wrote about how magnifying your field of vision when it comes to your perspective on progress is key to generating the momentum and joy to accomplish big things. He expressed this lesson concisely in two graphs:
versus this:
There's a hard road to travel to get to big-time achievements and reaching heady dreams, whether it's making your first million, mastering the piano, or running a marathon, and if you're too exhausted every day to take stock of your successes, you'll lose heart. Take a note from Marc Andreessen:
[Y]ou know those days when you're running around all day and doing stuff and talking to people and making calls and responding to emails and filling out paperwork and you get home and you're completely exhausted and you say to yourself, "What the hell did I actually get done today?"
Your Anti-Todo list has the answer.
Paul Graham's advice for startups, which applies to tackling challenges in general.
Start small, and then onward and forward to big things!
We live in a culture that seems obsessed with being productive.
While increasing our output and doing more with our time is certainly an admirable goal, according to Tony Schwartz, author of Be Excellent at Anything, that misguided approach is actually liable to hurt your productivity.
How so?
Without real restoration and rejuvenation throughout the day, people (knowingly) hold themselves back because they are worried about "pacing" their energy to make it through the day.
This is incredibly damaging to your potential, because it distributes your efforts at 25% across your whole work day instead of reaching 90% output at the moments that correspond with your body's naturally productive rhythms of alertness. The result is that you aren't able to do your best work and you aren't getting the rest you need to rejuvenate yourself either.
I know I've fallen into the trap of conventional thinking that to be productive, I just need to work harder. I spend more and more hours at the desk, but when I look back, I'm not sure where the time went.
To Schwartz, not being able to push yourself to 90% output without worry is the biggest impediment holding you back from being truly productive and producing your best work. True productivity is determined by better energy management rather than simply cranking out more hours at your desk.What do our energy levels actually look like throughout the day?
We all have a sense of our energy level, whether we feel productive or not, whether we're alert and excited or tired and groggy, but most of us try to ignore it and don't know the science underlying its effect on our work. It turns out that our energy functions according to what psychophysiologist Peretz Lavie called "ultradian rhythms," or natural cycles that take place during the day.
Lavie conducted a fascinating series of experiments where he put young adults on an ultrashort 15 minute awake-5 minute sleeping schedule in 8-hour sessions, first from 4 pm until midnight, and then after 6-7 hours of sleep, he put them on the 15/5 schedule from about 7 am until early afternoon. He then observed when his test subjects fell asleep and couldn't fall asleep during this bizarre sleep schedule and came up with some surprising findings.
In the afternoon and evenings, we get sleepy at two times: at 4:30 pm and at 11:30 pm. But in the morning, we get sleepy every 90 minutes. These 90-minute cycles are our ultradian rhythms which define when we're naturally feeling awake and productive. We perform our best in between those periods of drowsiness.
(via DeeperDish)How do we sync to our natural rhythm?
Those who work with instead of against their ultradian rhythm perform better, according to a study on world-class violinists. You might expect the best violinists to practice until their fingers bleed. Not so. Top-tier violinists practice no more than 4 1/2 hours a day, in 90-minute bursts, plus they got more sleep than their peers (notably, 20-30 minute afternoon naps).
It's not just about concentrating when your energy levels are high. It's also absolutely vital that you rest when your energy levels hit bottom. One piece of research that Schwartz regularly cites is a Federal Aviation Administration study of pilots on long haul flights that shows the crucial importance of resting when your energy levels are low:
One group of pilots was given an opportunity to take 40-minute naps mid-flight, and ended up getting an average of 26 minutes of actual sleep. Their median reaction time improved by 16% following their naps.
Non-napping pilots, tested at a similar halfway point in the flight, had a 34% deterioration in reaction time. They also experienced 22 micro sleeps of 2-10 seconds during the last 30 minutes of the flight. The pilots who took naps had none.
If you push yourself to continue working during periods of low energy, you risk continued grogginess and low performance. It's critical that we acknowledge our body's natural rhythms and align our periods of work and relaxation with them to work in a sustainably productive way.You improve by pushing your practice, not yourself during low energy.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice" is what you need to become an expert in your field. Research from psychologist Anders Ericsson on deliberate practice shows that it's true strain and "wear and tear" that helps people build expertise.
(via K. A. Ericsson, Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363-406)
Although getting into a flow may feel good, sometimes we use the term "flow" to describe times when we're not pushing ourselves very hard. But it's the hard practice that allows us to improve. A good metaphor is weightlifting at the gym: while a good flow might involve a 30-minute walk and some light free weights, if you are looking to push yourself into chiseled, six-pack ab territory, you've gotta hurt.
Building muscle at that level doesn't come without pushing into the territory of the uncomfortable, and this is why Schwartz and noted authors like Cal Newport are so adamant about these "hold nothing back" periods of work. During these sessions, it's vital that we challenge ourselves with increasing difficulty and focus uncompromisingly on how to fix our weaknesses.
When deliberate practice corresponds with periods of intense concentration, we suss out our weaknesses, make progress, and do our best work.3 Important tricks for managing your energy
- Break your work sessions into 90-minute blocks: I tested this for myself, and I noticed that the feeling of reckless abandon in being able to give your all for those 90 minute periods was incredibly useful in allowing yourself to pour out creativity without having to think, "What will I have left for the end of the day?" It's a surprising bit of mental jiujitsu, but it works: I feel energized and empowered to operate at peak levels because I know that it's only for 90 minutes.
- After your 90-minute sessions, take 15 minute breaks: According to Schwartz, breaking up work periods into 90 minute sessions with the knowledge that there will be a 15 minute break at the end is a great process to get started with balancing energy and recovery throughout the day. This way, the 90 minute work period can be approached without having to worry about pacing or burnout: a scheduled break is just on the horizon. It seems strange to allow yourself these sorts of breaks if you are a person who prides themselves with being busy/productive (two very different things, actually), but on the advice of Schwartz and the complementary studies that support it, it's definitely worth a try.
- Take Naps: The naps were the hardest sell for me, but after seeing the science behind napping by my buddy Leo Widrich, I was sold on at least giving them a go and was very glad I did: my productivity "dip" around 4pm is now all but gone, thanks to a quick 30-minute nap at 3pm. Schwartz gives this schedule as a sample:
Nick, by contrast, works intensely for approximately 90 minutes at a stretch, and then takes a 15-minute break before resuming work. At 12:15, he goes out for lunch for 45 minutes, or works out in a nearby gym.
At 3pm, he closes his eyes at his desk and takes a rest. Sometimes it turns into a 15- or 20-minute nap. Finally, between 4:30 and 5pm, Nick takes a 15-minute walk outside.
Your Turn
What did you think of the research in this post and Schwartz's approach to finding a work schedule that works with you?
Let me know in the comments, and thanks for reading!
About the Author: Gregory Ciotti is the marketing guy at Help Scout, the invisible help desk software that makes email support a breeze for you and your customers. Get more from Greg on the Help Scout customer loyalty blog.
@allanbranch Yup, and we love it.
— Chris Savage (@csavage)September 18, 2012
Wistia provides super easy, distinctive video hosting, management, and marketing for businesses. We wanted to find out from co-founder and CEO, Chris Savage, how Wistia uses iDoneThis and why they love it.
In the past year, Wistia has gone through a growth spurt, doubling to a total of fifteen people. Chris wrote a great blog post about the challenges of staying productive during such rapid growth, pointing out how Wistia's "internal communication mechanisms have had to evolve so that they are less disruptive, more relevant, and more helpful."
Allotted ample ownership and authority, people at Wistia have a great deal of freedom over what they do. As a result, as Chris explains, "it's hard to know what everyone else is doing, which I think is really important." So, the Wistia team uses iDoneThis to "facilitate what would often be those random connections that would happen if you were sitting next to somebody, if you were walking by somebody working on something."
iDoneThis enables fast-growing companies like Wistia to revive something of the easy immediacy of two founders working in a room together, capturing valuable information that wouldn't have been pre-set on a task list or deemed "worthy" of sending out yet another email. Chris notes, "That's something that's been really big. It's good that other people can see that that's happening, know that it's important, and can comment on it."
The Wistia team relies on tools like Yammer to keep the productivity engine running and continues to hold weekly stand-up meetings, but specifically for announcing goals for the week. iDoneThis is used for "a very different purpose," says Chris. "It's an accomplishment list and a way to show others what we're working on. Other tools don't supply that."
What's distinctive about the Wistia team is the obvious pride that they have in the company culture and the deliberate effort with which that culture is cultivated. Chris elaborates, "A big thing we wanted to do was start to write it down and talk about it and have a vocabulary, because we felt like if we don't fight for it, we won't be able to maintain it. It actually feels like a competitive advantage."
Part of building that company culture meant defining a company identity, or the "Wistia way" of doing things. When Wistia launched a free version of its service in June, for example, they created a rap video instead of simply sending out an email and adding the plan to the pricing page. They did it the Wistia way: "Go a little over the top, have a lot of fun with it, and express our own excitement."
We haven't created a rap video about it, but we're very excited that iDoneThis helps make the Wistia way happen!
How To Create Time:
1. Eliminate or reduce media
2. Work offline.
3. Do less.
4. Don't make appointments or schedule meetings.
5. Sleep in two shifts.
6. Make time less precious."—Read the full tips from Caterina Fake, not just on how to create time, but how to work with joy.
Sue Shellenbarger explores The Peak Time for Everything for WSJ.
Some takeaways: Nap around 2pm. Tired times make for better open-ended thinking. And retweeting chances increase between 3-6 pm.
Circadian and natural rhythms, and thus peak times for doing stuff, depend on the individual. Read on for some pretty interesting ideas on how to set your activity to your inner clock.
Felicia Day, Lifehacker, I'm Felicia Day, and This is How I Work
Any.DO is an elegant task management application available for Android, iPhone, and the Chrome browser. While the app has received praise for its simplicity and ability to sync across platforms, the Tel Aviv-based startup found that it needed some management tools to synchronize itself, with one of its founders, Omer Perchik, relocating to San Francisco. Plus, the company, which started in 2010, saw its team nearly double to twelve people.
Any.DO turned to iDoneThis to sync its team, and as co-founder Yoni Lindenfeld explains, to solve one of the challenges of fast growth — how to get all the newbies up to speed. "It's a good tool to get new people coming on board to understand what other people are doing and to show other people what they're doing."
Communication and coordination are priorities for Any.DO, achieved through transparency regarding the inner workings of the company. "It's really important for us for everyone to be involved and aware," declares Yoni, as part of Any.DO's tight-knit "family-style environment" work culture. These objectives led the Any.DO team to implement iDoneThis with a plan to be more specific in their daily entries. Yoni elaborates, "Before we started using it, we talked to everyone about how we would profit most from using it. It's going great because people are writing more details about what they're doing and other people," —including new hires — "know more details. It's a great tool."
Everyone at Any.DO uses their own creation to manage personal and work-related tasks, but according to Yoni, iDoneThis plays a different role. "When you put a task in your to-do list, it's more of a personal thing. Actually that's something we've learned from researching a lot about how users manage their tasks. Tasks are usually much more personal and you don't elaborate a lot because it's just something that will remind you about what you want to do." Meanwhile, a tool like iDoneThis functions more broadly and publicly. Members find value both in personally focusing on accomplishments and in sharing that attention with others.
We're delighted that a company that made a task management app uses iDoneThis to help get them from to-do task to Done!
The availability of seed-stage funding today means that there are a ton of first-time entrepreneurs out there assembling teams and building companies without any experience running a team or managing people. Building a team in this environment is especially difficult because funded companies typically grow teams prior to sustainability or product-market fit. It's hard to steer the team in the right direction when you yourself don't quite know what to build.
Naval Ravikant at AngelList has blogged about "Building a team that ships", describing his assembled team as "self-managing people who ship code." Naval calls this peer management: one person per project (with help from others as needed), no middle managers, and individual choice on what to work on using accountability is the rudder. In his words: "Promise what you'll do in the coming week on internal Yammer. Deliver – or publicly break your promise – next week."
At iDoneThis, we've seen peer management as an effective approach to take for the young startup CEO. We've worked closely with many first-time entrepreneurs like Danny Wen at Harvest and Tobi Lutke at Shopify who have succeeded in building unique, quirky, and profitable companies by empowering individuals at their companies to manage themselves and each other to build out great products exceeding a high standard of excellence. Here are some keys to effective peer management that we're seeing.
Systemized Accountability
Skillshare uses a system called Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to systemize accountability. Every individual is responsible for company objectives, which are broken into measurable bites in the form of key results, resulting in alignment within and accountability throughout the team. At the end of every week, month, and quarter, individuals measure themselves against their OKRs to evaluate performance.
OKRs have a rich history in building great tech companies, going back to Andy Grove at Intel in the 1980s and what he called "Management by Objective." Drawing a fundamental distinction between output and activity, Grove's use of the word "objective" involves dual meanings. Output is both the objective and something that's objectively measurable, while activity is a black box. An engineer at heart, management by objective was Grove's way of bringing scientific and engineering principles to management.
OKRs have since been embraced by tech giants like Google and Zynga and spread throughout the Valley and to the broader tech world. At Salesforce, they do V2MOMs (vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measurement); at Yammer, they do MORPHs (mission, objectives, results, people, and how did you do); others use KPIs (key performance indicators). While the acronyms may vary, the general principles hold true.
To Mark Pincus, OKRs are the solution to the basic problem that's at the heart of many a founder's anxious and sleepless night: how "to keep everybody going in productive directions when you're not in the room." Every individual has one objective, and they are the CEO of that objective, entrusted with authority and accountability for their objective and the key results necessary to get there.
Individual Data Tracking
"Do things, tell people. These are the only things you need to do to be successful." When individuals are CEOs of objectives, goals, and projects, they need a way of measuring the intermediate progress and activity of themselves and their peers. As with the quantified self movement, tracking progress — writing it down — leads to reflection, knowledge, and betterment.
In old school, hierarchical companies, information that passed down to employees or up to executives had to travel through middle managers and that created a single-point of failure anti-pattern. You had to rely on your manager to get information and also to market your accomplishments upward to upper management and the executive team.
Where individuals manage themselves and each other, it's vitally important that everyone gets the requisite information flow they need to do their jobs and that they have channels to market their own accomplishments and results.
The system of snippets adopted at Google is an example not of big brother monitoring, but of empowering individuals to see everything that's happening in the company so that they can find their niche in the company and contribute. You get a weekly email that asks what they did last week and what they plan to do in the upcoming week. Replies get compiled in a public space and distributed automatically the following day by email.
The power of snippets is in gathering data to demystify the black box of the notoriously fuzzy production process — in which raw material turns into output with the application of labor — and makes progress possible to measure, analyze, and recognize. It makes sense then that peer management environments tend towards transparency, meritocracy, and individual professional fulfillment. Companies on the rise like Shopify and Harvest track and celebrate their daily accomplishments with a daily email from us here at iDoneThis.
Fit as a Deal Breaker
In company cultures of extremely high personal autonomy, fit is paramount because it reduces friction in every interaction. Companies like Valve and Github tout bossless cultures. Stripe is building a world-class team and every employee can veto a potential hire.
While fit can be tested by hiring a candidate first as a contractor, fit often amounts to guesswork based on intuition and impression during interviews. Peter Thiel said PayPal once rejected a top-notch engineering candidate because he said during an interview that he liked to play "hoops," and a PayPal engineer does not play basketball, much less "hoops." The wisdom of that decision is unclear, but that decision process no doubt solidified a sense of self in the team.
Fit is about an ever-solidifying sense of self as much as it is about bringing on like-minded people, and that sense spawns canonical stories and processes. Carwoo is a company that's a little weird, so they ask every interviewee how weird she thinks she is on a scale of 1 to 5. There is a right answer. 3-4 is the sweet spot a weird person who is self-aware.
Wistia is a company that highly values its culture and the unique identity it has built. Co-founder and CEO Chris Savage finds that combination of autonomy, culture, and fit becomes "a competitive advantage", as Wistia hires more people, "the culture of the company should get stronger because we're hiring for values that the company believes in, and people with those values should make it stronger."
* * * * *
As work gets automated and outsourced, self-directed, creative work is required in ever-increasing degree. Peer management not only makes us more efficient, but it builds a workplace that enables — as Dan Pink describes — autonomy, master, and purpose that makes work fulfilling and joyful.
Liked this post? Subscribe to our free newsletter for more great content on productivity, startups, and how to work better!
Walter Chen is co-founder of iDoneThis, an ex-lawyer, and an amateur Starcraft player. Follow him at @smalter or Google+.
Ray Bradbury, in an interview with the Paris Review.
Maybe we should make an iDoneThis theme song out of these words, they're so apt.
Thanks to a study by Japanese scientists at Hiroshima University's Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, titled "The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus", you can be guilt-free when looking at photos of ridiculously cute animals at work.
Published in the journal, PLOS ONE, the study found that viewing photos of cute animals — which induces positive emotions — results in improved "subsequent performance in tasks that require behavioral carefulness, possibly by narrowing the breadth of attentional focus."
Well then! Here are a few cuties to focus you today:
We've written before about the secret to happiness and motivation at work. Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer wrote a whole book about it called The Progress Principle. They found that the number one driver of a positive inner work life, the key to motivated, engaged, and productive employees, is making progress on meaningful work, even if that progress is a small win.
In a recent 99U conference talk, Professor Amabile shared the best way to achieve those small wins and leverage the progress principle in our daily lives: keeping a work diary. We're so pleased that she suggested using iDoneThis as an online work diary tool, and we thought we could break down how iDoneThis contributes to the four benefits of keeping a work diary that she identifies:
1. Capture progress that may have been lost in a busy workday and celebrate the small wins.
Professor Amabile notes that even on frustrating, seemingly unproductive days, you can almost always find one thing on which you made progress. Note it. Celebrate it. "This is the best way to leverage the progress principle," Professor Amabile says. Next stop: more awesomeness.
iDoneThis helps you see your workday through the lens of accomplishment because it asks, "What'd you get done today?" In taking a moment to reflect on this question, you make a habit out of focusing on the progress you made and your wins, however small. Writing and recording wins in your iDoneThis calendar is a quiet affirmation and celebration.
2. Plan next steps, think things through, and overcome setbacks.
Professor Amabile also suggests using a work diary to consider the causes of setbacks you experience and create a plan of action if a similar problem rears its head again. The Progress Principle encourages learning from negative experiences and counts those valuable lessons toward your overall progress, turning negatives into net positives.
iDoneThis contributes to such positive growth, because it keeps a record of all your daily doings. You can go back into your log and see what decisions, actions and efforts led to the setback. In short, you can pinpoint where things started to go wrong. This record gives you the information to form a plan of action to resolve similar setbacks. Down the road, your iDoneThis becomes a map to which you can refer back and see how you overcame obstacles.
3. Nurture your own personal growth and work through difficult events.
In her talk, Professor Amabile provides an example of one engineer struggling through the experience of massive layoffs at her company. While grappling with the stress of watching her team members being laid off and her own uncertainty about the future, the engineer turned to her work diary to center her thoughts. She recognized that because she had no control over her position at the company, instead she would focus on the one thing that she did have control over — her work.
iDoneThis is about you, you the captain of your work. It's not a task-specific or project-oriented tool in that it isn't interested in micromanaging questions like: "How far did you get on Project X today?" or "What did you do for Team Y?" No, it asks, "What'd you get done today?"
This is a question that matters when the going gets tough. Your progress is what matters, not that of a particular endeavor. If you need to center yourself and regain control of a situation by focusing on work, iDoneThis allows you to see evidence of your control and progress. If you need to focus on your emotional and cognitive processes, iDoneThis provides an outlet for that as well.
4. Spot patterns in your reactions and behaviors. Identify your greatest strengths and weaknesses.
In The Progress Principle, Professor Amabile recommends asking yourself at the end of each month, "Do I notice trends over time in this journal? What are the implications?" She also describes how research participants would change their behavior based on recognizing unwarranted and unconstructive behavior patterns.
Patterns of behavior and trends are easy to spot with tools like iDoneThis. Because iDoneThis records all your entries in an easy-to-read monthly calendar, you can see at a glance the ebb and flow of your inner work life, day to day, week to week, month to month.
iDoneThis also provides a Word Cloud, a fun way to spot trends in your entries. The Word Cloud is populated with the most commonly used words in your entries. At the moment, my most commonly used words seem to be "worked", "idonethis", and "gym." Sounds about right.
5. Find patience.
Professor Amabile adds a bonus benefit to her list of four, noting that keeping a work diary "can help to cultivate patience." Why? Because you can always look back and see how you persevered and survived much worse days.
It's especially true if you've kept your work diary with iDoneThis. Every day that you make an entry, you'll see a blue check mark appear over each calendar day. Over time, you'll see from the number of blue checkmarks in your iDoneThis calendar that there are no unproductive days. Even on the worst days, you achieved accomplishments worthy of note. Don't believe it? Click on that day and see for yourself. There's always something in each of your past days to be proud of that contributed to the successes that came later on.
It's an honor for us to have Professor Amabile's recommendation. It's always been our goal to create a tool that helps people find happiness, meaning, and motivation at work through celebrating their daily progress, however incremental.
Ginni Chen is Chief Happiness Officer at iDoneThis. When not striving for the happiness of iDoneThis members, she's a rock climbing instructor, skier and collector of first edition books. You should follow her on Twitter at @GinniChen.
September 2012
21 posts
Here's the weekly round-up of the best of the blog & links we've shared on the interwebs! Happy Friday!
How Mozilla uses iDoneThis to communicate and create.
The key to building an awesome team? Make employees feel like superheroes.
Stillpower, not willpower, is the key to flow and getting in the zone.
In case you need to read an article to remind you to please, take a real lunch break, like, regularly.
Some tips on how to get past creativity block.
The Mozilla Foundation has a super software team working on projects that range from Popcorn (a video remixing application) to Thimble (an easy-to-use web page maker) to Open Badges (a digital badges system that support learning and achievement).
Developer Jon Buckley talked with us about the struggle to align three teams when Mozilla wanted to integrate Badges into both Popcorn and Thimble. Combining multiple product worlds could very well collide into chaos and confusing communication, but Mozilla is seeing smooth sailing.
Status update discussion used to fall to a weekly call, which was time-consuming, while a shared mailing list was only used periodically for such purposes. The Mozilla teams soon turned to iDoneThis to coordinate communication for people spread across time zones and for cutting across teams. "You don't have to worry about being in the same room at the same time. That asynchronous nature of updating people is very helpful."
After the switch, Mozilla found that they cut down on a ton of meeting time and used their gatherings for things that required real conversation. "I still find meetings have their place," Jon noted, "but if you don't have to give a status at a meeting because you're using iDoneThis, then that's a way you can save a meeting for this particular problem that we need to tackle. Let us discuss this in person."
Jon is one of our work-style kindred spirits in his cultivation of time away from the distraction of Things That Constantly Refresh like, IRC, Twitter, and bugmail. He prefers to turn them off and head into one of the smaller conference rooms to work without distraction.
Personally, he has found iDoneThis helpful in broadening his perspective from building software for developers to building for a general audience, because he gains insight from his UI and UX design teammates. "If they've been working on mockups, they can post that in their status, so we can get visibility into what they're doing. It's not quite obvious. On our team, we use a bug tracker really heavily, and the UI or the UX designer workflow doesn't fit into that all that well, so it's useful to have a way to see what they're working on that we can comment on."
The Mozilla Foundation's getting stuff done and innovating for the people. We're psyched that we're helping Jon and his team build an open, accessible web by opening up avenues of communication and collaboration!
Happy Monday everyone, and happy building your way to LOT!
Reddit, the popular social content site and community, hands power to the people to decide what's important and what's not. iDoneThis likewise hands the reins to Reddit's team to use how they see fit.
With the Reddit team scattered, from San Francisco to New York and in between, the challenge may be to get a virtual team on the same page. Yet, the main use of iDoneThis for the Reddit team is as a personal record, and then by extension, as a reference for the team.
Reddit's general manager Erik Martin explains, "We all wear a lot of hats. We're only about twenty people. All of us do a bunch of different things, so it's hard for us to jump around. It's nice to be able to track how that's going, maybe not what we're spending time on as much but what we accomplish on any given day."
So Erik's team members use iDoneThis as a simple way to keep track of what they have done and what hat they wore that day. It's not used to check in on people in an oppressive way nor is submitting entries absolutely mandatory. "I don't want people to wake up and go, oh, I forgot to do my thing, that's not the point. I don't want it to be a chore." The team's individual spirit extends to the various ways people interact with iDoneThis, whether it's on the web, e-mail, or phone. "I like how lightweight it is. It's simple and flexible," comments Erik who uses the web interface so that he can toggle between his team and personal calendar.
What's especially useful for the Reddit team is the ability to see real progress. "It's nice to see what you've accomplished especially when a lot of the work we do is vague. It's not like building something with your hands where you see the progress, so it's nice to look back and see what you've done and what other people have been working on."
Erik's team used to have a weekly email thread to keep an eye on people's progress but it's difficult to remember that much for that long. Most of us know that five days in a workweek can go by like Dali's melty clock — that's pretty hard to capture. iDoneThis takes care of keeping a record for Erik and his team. We think it's pretty awesome that we're helping Reddit continue making the front page of the internet!
iDoneThis recently added itself to the Google Apps Marketplace and the Google Chrome Web Store, providing OpenID single-sign-on access to iDoneThis through Google accounts. It's a great feature to have, but as we found during our implementation, one rife with security concerns. Security advisories from both Google [2] and the OpenID foundation [3] pointed out possible vulnerabilities with various OpenID implementations related to the failure to check for signed AX attributes. But the failed check for signed AX attributes by certain implementations of OpenID is really a peripheral issue. A more fundamental security threat results from the incongruent use of the OpenID protocol for trust when it was meant for identification. This article discusses how our integration of Google OpenID single-sign-on addresses the issues brought forth by the security advisories as well as the more central issue of proper OpenID usage.
Illustration from: http://openidexplained.com
App Integration with Google OpenID Single-Sign-On
Our application is built on Python/Django and as a result, we looked to django-social-auth as a framework to provide OpenID authentication with the existing Django users account framework. django-social-auth itself relies on the python-openid library to handle the actual OpenID protocol implementation. One feature that django-social-auth provides is the ability to associate existing Django user accounts with new OpenID identies if they share the same email address. This is great for our existing users that now want to be able to access their iDoneThis account via Google Apps or Chrome. But using email addresses as identities for account associating could be a security risk.
Implementation Vulnerabilities in Handling of Unsigned AX Attributes
During the OpenID authentication process, an OpenID consumer, like iDoneThis, can request and receive an OpenID user's email address as part of the Attribute Exchange (AX) extension. Last year, based on research from Wang, Chen and Wang [1], Google and the OpenID foundation published security advisories [2][3] that pointed out that certain OpenID implementations did not check that certain information passed through AX was properly signed. The Google advisory highlights one possible exploitation of this vulnerability:
"A specific scenario identified involves a website that accepts an unsigned AX attribute for email address, and then logs the user in to a local account on that website associated with the email address. When a website asks Google's OpenID provider (IDP) for someone's email address, we always sign it in a way that cannot be replaced by an attacker. However, many websites do not ask for email addresses for privacy reasons among others, and so it is a perfectly legitimate response for the IDP to not include this attribute by default. An attacker could forge an OpenID request that doesn't ask for the user's email address, and then insert an unsigned email address into the IDPs response. If the attacker relays this response to a website that doesn't notice that this attribute is unsigned, the website may be tricked into logging the attacker in to any local account."
Since our implementation utilized django-social-auth's email-based account association feature, we were potentially vulnerable to such an attack. We weren't able to find any documentation or reports that indicated the python-openid library checked for properly signed AX attributes, so we peformed our own security audit of the code. Our audit showed that the current version of python-openid (2.2.5) does, by default, only return properly signed AX attributes.
The crucial snippet of code comes from ax.py in the python-openid library:
def fromSuccessResponse(cls,success_response,signed=True): """ @param signed: Whether non-signed args should be processsed. If True (the default), only signed arguments will be processsed. @returns: A FetchResponse containing the data from the OpenID message, or None if the SuccessResponse did not contain AX extension data. """ self = cls() ax_args = success_response.extensionResponse(self.ns_uri, signed)
The django-social-auth code utilizes this default behavior of python-openid, meaning we were in the clear with regard to this attack.
Proper Usage of Signed AX Attributes
As we were researching this OpenID security issue, we found a number of people advising against the use of any AX attribute (including an email address) as a means of identification. One poster on the OpenID mailing list wrote:
"Actually, you should never use anything but the openid.claimed_id in the positive assertion to identify the user. This or openid.identity are the only values that could possibly be used to identify the user.
The chairman of the OpenID foundation himself, wrote on his blog [4]:
"The correct behavior is to identify the user using openid.claimed_id. Other parameters MUST NOT be used to identify the user. If RP uses any other parameter to identify the user, then it is a security hole. This is the root of problem."
Given these emphatic warnings against using an email address AX attribute for identity related purposes, we thought long and hard about the security implications of using the email address AX attribute as a means of identification for our Google Apps Marketplace and Chrome Web Store OpenID sign-in integration.
The core issue is that the OpenID protocol was designed to provide identity and not trust between the OpenID provider and the consumer. An OpenID provider will always attest to a user's unique identity (the openid.claimed_id or openid.identity attributes), but in general cannot be trusted to validate attribute information like a user's email address. For example, the iDoneThis OpenID provider can properly attest my identity to be mike.idonethis.com, but could falsely advertise my email address as email@example.com, even with properly signed AX attributes. This behavior could be leveraged by an attacker to gain access to accounts owned by firstname.lastname@example.com if the consumer gives account access based on the email address provided by the untrustworthy OpenID provider.
In the specific case of Google Apps Marketplace however, the discovery URL (https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/site-xrds?hd=domain.name) and the resulting OpenID endpoint (https://www.google.com/a/domain.name/o8/ud?be=o8) will always be a Google Apps OpenID server. This means that if we trust Google's OpenID servers to only provide email addresses that are properly owned by their respective Google Apps users, we can trust the user's ownership of these email addresses. Based on the security architecture and policies of Google Apps, the email address associated with a Google Apps account must always be owned by the Google Apps user. Non-Google Apps email addresses can also be associated with a Google Apps user, but the user must verify ownership of those additional email addresses. Because of this unique situation and context, we trust email address AX attributes provided to us by the Google Apps OpenID providers and use them for features such as associating existing iDoneThis users with Google Apps users. The same policy restrictions hold for Google Chrome Web Store users; the Google account OpenID provider is wholly controlled by Google and requires all associated email addresses to have their ownership verified.
Side Note: Reusable Credentials
One minor issue with email addresses as identification credentials is that they are potentially reusuable. firstname.lastname@example.com is currrently my email address, but could potentially in the future be assigned to another person. Reuse of email addresses is not an issue that we're concerned with as it common practice across the web to assume ownership of an email address implies ownership of the identity. Just about every web service provides account recovery via email.
Comments to: firstname.lastname@example.com
[1] Rui Wang, Shuo Chen, and XiaoFeng Wang. "Signing Me onto Your Accounts through Facebook and Google: a Traffic-Guided Security Study of Commercially Deployed Single-Sign-On Web Services".
[2] "Security advisory to websites using OpenID Attribute Exchange".
[3] "Attribute Exchange Security Alert".
[4] "Comments on Wang-Chen-Wang paper on OpenID Implementation Vulnerability".
GetWorkDoneMusic is a webapp by Ryan Ghods that plays music to help you get your work done … fast, or faster. The mostly electronic music is randomly pulled from SoundCloud playlists, and you can replay tracks you like, or skip to the next one.
What's on your productivity playlist?
When did work become so noisy?
I don't just mean the ambient noise, that clickity-clackity typing, strangely noticeable chewing, annoying finger tapping, and chit-chatting hubbub of an open floor plan office. I'm also talking about the information and social inundation invading our work life, the buzzes and pings, the tweets and likes, the emails and comments, the meetings and chats.
Our notion of productivity has become imbalanced toward focusing on the inbox of our thought process — input, information, inspiration. I can feel productive after scanning tweets, reading articles, even having an inspiring conversation, but if I don't take time to think and process, if I don't actually turn the input into something, that feeling is illusory.
Ultimately, productivity requires producing, creativity creating. It sounds so simple and obvious, but it has been easy to forget these days that we need solitude, quiet and time.The Need for Solitude
We need more of what Paul Graham has identified as maker's time versus manager's time. Makers need uninterrupted blocks of time to create and make progress in their work, the kind of schedule that resists carving out units of time for discrete tasks. For a maker, a meeting can disrupt and derail a whole day's work.
The difference between makers and managers is not just in type of schedule, but more basically, in the nature of their work. Makers require solitude and quiet while managers require interaction and conversation. Solitude is necessary to create, to pay attention to yourself, to tune into what psychiatrist T. Byram Karasu calls your internal rhythm or music. Tuning in allows "time for previously unrelated thoughts and feelings to interact, to regroup themselves into new formations and combinations."
Similarly, the late psychologist Ester Buchholz explains:
Solitude is required for the unconscious to process and unravel problems. Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers…. The natural creativity in all of us—the sudden and slow insights, bursts and gentle bubbles of imagination—is found as a result of alonetime. Passion evolves in aloneness. Both creativity and curiosity are bred through contemplation.
Apple's Steve Wozniak, too, champions alonetime for the sake of the creative process:
Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me — they're shy and they live in their heads. They're almost like artists….And artists work best alone — best outside corporate environments, best where they can control an invention's design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee.
Woz's point isn't just relevant to artists, inventors, and engineers, nor is it correct to say so broadly that the only and best way is to work alone. It highlights how privacy, solitude, and autonomy are needed to get stuff done by limiting inputs that can reach the level of buzzy noise, the committees and groupthink and interference that restricts and interrupts innovation and creativity. Without some quiet, how can you listen to what's in your head, let your own thoughts network?
Yet many of today's business software and apps, while intending to make getting work done easier, are often disruptive. Real-time activity feeds, like Yammer, ironically mirror the addictive features of Facebook and Twitter. Online gatherings via text, voice and video chat work essentially as meetings without end. They demand the kind of time and attention that are antithetical to the maker's schedule and make it difficult to hear and tune into yourself. Plugging in and collaboration is important but not as a continuous stream that burbles at the expense of actually producing and creating.Quieter Frequencies
It's not enough to point out how the noisiness of our information and work culture has created what Herbert A. Simon called a "poverty of attention," nor does it make sense to get off the grid altogether. Instead, let's tune into quieter channels that support the reflection and contemplation that enables us to better create. Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer, for example, have found that maintaining a work diary cultivates a practice of reflection and translates into engagement, motivation, and a positive impact on creativity, productivity, and commitment.
We think it's possible to provide web services that run on these quieter frequencies (though we want to find the right balance between serving both maker and manager, roles that aren't mutually exclusive of each other in the workplace). We've declared that iDoneThis is part of the slow web movement, because we want to encourage reflection and emphasize doing, to enrich our attention and help people turn toward meaningful engagement. Slow web, as Jack Cheng has so insightfully written, is:
Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information. … It's not so much a checklist as a feeling, one of being at greater ease with the web-enabled products and services in our lives.
While fast web is more about unfiltered consumption and real-time updates, slow web gives you some space and autonomy on how and when to engage, with timely interactions that "happen as you need them to happen."
Finding Joyful Flow at Work
The value of slow web can be easier to see in our personal lives. In that sphere, we risk losing time and attention for the people and pursuits we love when we crave those hits of fast web.
Still, in our work, we risk losing relevance and development of skills that we'll need to stay competitive. The unfolding of what Dan Pink describes as the Information Age into the Conceptual Age tracks the shift in qualities that will be required more and more in our work, adding to the traditional left-brain skills of reasoning and logic that have so pervaded the professional working landscape the right-brain skills of creativity, synthesis, and meaning. "In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices," he writes, "the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent."
In this data-deluged, choice-choking environment, we also compromise ourselves and our capability to become lost and absorbed in our work. We mess with our flow, that "in the zone" state of being where your mental energy and attention snap into focus, and you experience joy.
Pico Iyer in his lovely piece about the joy of quiet describes the paradox of technology, how what "made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier … cannot teach us how to make the best use of them." We can make better use of technology and information not only in our play but also our work. If we can tap into quieter channels and slower web, whatever it is that helps us really listen to ourselves, we fuel a burning flame, we build momentum, we help the maker make, we find more joy.
Liked this post? Subscribe to our newsletter for more great content on productivity, management, and how we work!
Janet Choi is the Chief Creative Officer at iDoneThis and keeps the wheels of the iDoneThis blog turning. She is not a morning person. Follow her tweets at @lethargarian.
Images: [1] Richard Rutter/Flickr; [2] Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig/Flickr; [3] Anne Petersen/Flickr
How iDoneThis aspires to build a product that fulfills a maker's schedule while meeting the manager's needs.
However you walk the talk is what builds your company culture. And so are your values.
How do you give difficult feedback to a team leader?
A team-building scavenger hunt that worked.
Our glimpse into how PagerDuty uses us!
Photo: Jackson Carson
Systems down? Who you gonna call? PagerDuty is on it! The service dispatches alerts collected from system monitoring tools through email, SMS, phone, and mobile and provides no-fuss on-call management.
PagerDuty is all about intelligent messaging, integrating with tools you already have to notify the right person to deal with the problem, based on schedule and situation.
We're fans of how PagerDuty promotes efficient, effective communication. The company carries over this value to its inner workings as well, implementing iDoneThis in place of its old daily stand-up meetings. "Instead of adding more meetings, I can see what everyone is up to by simply checking my email," saysPagerDuty co-founder and CTO, Andrew Miklas. "The iDoneThis digests are the first thing I read every morning. I glance through them on my phone before I even get out of bed."
Launched in 2009, the company has grown to seventeen employees, with three main teams, dealing with operations, product, and messaging. Going through stand-up meetings with seventeen people got old fast, because of inconsistent staff attendance, and as Andrew explains, "some people just don't like the daily stand-ups."
Stand-ups can be intrusive and put people on the spot. A team leader who thought they were ineffective was the one to nudge PagerDuty to replace their meetings with iDoneThis. Now, PagerDuty's staff are more responsive reporting in writing and can keep tabs on what's going on by subscribing to a group.
While Andrew acknowledged the difficulty of a growing startup to find the right alignment of tools for getting stuff done, he has found that iDoneThis scales well as dev teams are added. "One of the things with iDoneThis that people really like is that it's so unstructured." Instead of having to make a ticket to record how you spent time interviewing people for two hours, for example, and then marking it as complete, "with iDoneThis, they can just say it."
We're delighted that we can help the PagerDuty team to just say all the awesome stuff they get done in order to be ever reliable in urgent situations to sound the alarm.
Business software's increasing focus on real-time collaboration, activity streams and consumerization threatens what Paul Graham called the "maker's schedule" in the workplace. Makers need long blocks of uninterrupted time to concentrate on ambitious, creative work. The result of always-on availability, random notification, and constant information deluge is a work mode of interruption-driven multitasking that's antithetical to a maker's needs.
Digital connectivity empowers managers to collaborate with makers in creating, but without regard to when. Because modern collaboration tools flow so neatly within their kind of schedule, managers often don't realize the costs to the maker. At iDoneThis, we use a bunch of awesome collaborative tools including Asana, Github, Campfire, Google Docs, Skype, and Trello, and we've observed how those tools can disrupt maker's time.
For instance, in Github, we noticed that creating a bug ticket and assigning it to someone will often result in that person switching tasks to kill the bug, regardless of its urgency or assigned priority level — all because the ticket assignment triggers an email notification. We decided to avoid assigning tickets during work hours unless the ticket needs to be resolved immediately.
We use Campfire for group chat, but we saw how a scrolling chat format can be a visual distraction and group chat can devolve into one long, endless meeting. Plus, without extended time alone, work product can end up designed by committee, a problem of too many cooks. So instead, we have quiet time during the day when we work away from chat in order to focus without interruption.
Similarly, Asana's comment threads are a great way to discuss projects and action items, but we try to batch these toward the end of the day. Otherwise, email notifications of comments get triggered and they disrupt and add to the multitasking that pulls your full attention away from the task at hand.
With iDoneThis, we aim to create a quieter frequency for non-urgent, unstructured communication at work. We've found that having such a communication channel is essential to creating a bubble that protects and enhances maker's time without sacrificing open and transparent communication within a company.
The way we work is through an evening email that asks, "What'd you get done today?" Just reply. In the morning, everyone gets a digest that shows what the team got done—to kickstart another awesome day. Pesky status updates aren't randomly interspersed throughout your day, they occur on a rhythm that bookends the day — reflect and jot down your dones in the evening and scan your morning digest to get up to speed.
iDoneThis becomes the place for recording the reflective thought that's vital to evaluation and improvement but often gets ignored in the hustle and bustle. A valuable repository of little nuggets of learnings, notes, emotions, appreciation, and thanks gets built up, bit by bit. You can record any non-urgent communication during the day, and you know that you won't be bothering anyone with it — they'll see it the next morning when they're sipping a cup of coffee.
At the same time, we've struggled with realizing our maker's schedule aspirations real through the product.
- Notifications: We started with no real-time notification system, and when we implemented a feedback system of "comments" and "likes", we built them into the evening/morning rhythm to avoid disruption. After running with that for a bit, our members told us that they expected the comments to happen in real-time. We found that people wanted to start a conversation about what had been recorded the previous day, and the lack of real-time email notification of comments made the conversation die, resulting in a failure to surface relevant knowledge at the right moment. No doubt, real-time email notification increases engagement with the product and that's the primary reason for its pervasiveness, but engagement itself isn't an end. We think we can look to the job that makers and managers alike wish to accomplish with the mechanics of iDoneThis to determine whether a notification should be turn-based or real-time rather than applying the real-time design pattern across our site without thinking.
- Privilege: We began by treating every user as exactly the same, no one having a privilege that others didn't, because our gut told us that it was important for building credibility. We didn't want people to feel wary about a lack of transparency, that the tool was actually more for monitoring and control rather than for sharing progress and celebrating it. feel wary for lack of transparency that the tool was for actually for monitoring and control rather than for sharing progress and celebrating it. Nevertheless, we've seen that managers have felt the most strongly about wanting their companies to adopt our product, and as a result, we've seen an uptick in user adoption by empowering managers with configuration options to help make iDoneThis work for the way their team operates. While we've given managers admin access that other members lack, we've done it through the lens of helping managers better serve their team, and we think that's a distinction that will stick.
- Adoption: Where adoption happens through management, as it does for most business applications, the managers become your customers. Managers as customers inevitably request features that will help them do their jobs better, and who can blame them? We often receive requests for a manager's-only view, which makes explicit who is failing to comply and provides mechanics to more strictly enforce compliance. When managers are the ones who are paying us, they become the people we want to please, but as the product's creators, we also have a broader view on what works across companies. And the number one challenge for building open communication and a healthy work culture does not revolve around what the manager wants in the individual case, rather it's getting trust and buy-in from everyone in the company. Armed with that knowledge, we try out best to focus on what's best for makers and managers alike.
What's at stake in developing business collaboration software is building and reinventing the modern office into the type of place we'd all like to work in. For us, that means ensuring alone time, maker's time, and the quiet time we need to do our best, most fulfilling work.
Jane E. Brody, NYT Well, "Changing Our Tune on Exercise"
Brody writes about how reframing the message of why we should exercise as improving current happiness and well-being is more motivating than using hard-to-see long-term goals like losing weight and prevented disease.
Water, water, water!
Gloria Mark, LA Times, Email Stress Test: Experiment unplugs workers for 5 days
Professor Mark did a study to find out what would happen if you did away with work email. She found that people were less stressed, simply communicated face-to-face more (what, human interaction!?), were more productive, and able to focus longer.
While there are great benefits to stepping away from email, it's hard to escape the compulsion to be chained to work email. How do we shift social expectation and work culture on the instant timing of email?
A happy Labor Day to those of you in the US! Go get relaxin' to honor all that work we do!
Photo: Mohamed Muha
Happy Saturday all! Catch up with some of our favorites things we've shared during the week:
We wrote about reconsidering the startup open floor plan office.
Whitney Hess writes on empathy versus apathy and organizational culture.
Get rid of stupid rules at work.
The importance of building a company culture.
Open yourself to life.
August 2012
23 posts
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook's plans for a new campus, a 420,000 square foot single-story warehouse made to look like "a hill in nature," one giant room fitting thousands of people. He described their aspiration as wanting to build "the perfect engineering space."
I admit that Zuck's statement caught me off guard because I dislike the typical open floor plan office and so do most engineers that I know. Many engineers wear headphones to create the missing wall so that they can concentrate and focus on coding without distraction. We chose the small offices at WeWork in SOMA, SF, over co-working for those reasons.
The New York Times reported that recent research supported the hunch that open floor plan offices reduce productivity. The research showed that ambient conversations at work and a noisy office space contributed to "a decline of 5 percent to 10 percent on the performance of cognitive tasks requiring efficient use of short-term memory, like reading, writing and other forms of creative work." According to the researcher, "Noise is the most serious problem in the open-plan office, and speech is the most disturbing type of sound because it is directly understood in the brain's working memory."
Nevertheless, the open floor plan office has become a shibboleth of startup culture. It reflects our rejection of hierarchy, and our embrace of agility, collaboration and creativity, and as a result, many startups take the open floor plan for granted.
We've recently visited two startups, Shopify and Zappos, that are reconsidering and riffing off of the standard startup open floor plan office, and we've been inspired by what they've come up with to ensure that engineers have the relative solitude that they need to get in the zone, without reverting away from the promise of the open floor plan for serendipity, collaboration and work happiness.
Work and Play at Shopify
Shopify, an e-commerce platform, is on their fourth office in their sixth year of existence, so they've learned a thing or two about offices. One important thing they've learned is that they don't like open floor plans.
At Shopify, they work in pods, which are rooms of the 6-8 people you work closely with on a day-to-day basis. The pods shoot off from a central hallway loop. On the outside of the loop are the pods, and on the inside are small private meeting rooms and conference rooms.
Attached to the core of the office is a big open space called the Annex where they hold their weekly all-hands meeting and host events in the community. Daily free lunch and a big, central kitchen with free drinks and snacks facilitate collaboration and serendipity, but when people open themselves up to it, not on a constant barrage.
The configuration shows the value the company puts in quiet, distraction-free coding with your core collaborators. Open floor plan offices are noisy and distracting and that can prevent engineers from getting in a state of flow. There was definitely plenty of fun to be had in the office, but those areas weren't in places that would create distractions for others trying to work.
To me, this reflected an organizational value of work-life segmentation. We worked out of Shopify's office for a week, and we were shocked to see engineers come in at 9 and leave by 5 on a daily basis. Similarly, concentrated work happens in the work areas and hanging out and relaxing happens in the lounge areas. In Silicon Valley, work and play is all mixed up together so it sometimes feels like you're expected to work and play all at the same time all the time.
What "Open" Means to Zappos
Their offices look like total mayhem to the outside observer and it's hard not to wonder how anything gets done, especially with the world-famous Zappos tour rolling through the office nonstop. (Noticably absent from the tour, however, was the engineering team, which is housed in a separate building.)
They have a open floor plan at Zappos with team-oriented bullpens, but for them, that's far from sufficient in ensuring serendipitous interactions and a culture where everyone knows everyone. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is famous for taking measures to hack serendipity like only allowing Zappos employees to enter through one door in the building to force spontaneous encounters.
Zappos is taking the concept of the "open floor plan" to the next level with what you might call an open floor plan community. The irony of the open floor plan Silicon Valley corporate campus is that they're typically cloistered away from the community at large in their own ivory tower. Openness, collaboration, and nonhierarchical organization is the order of the day, but among themselves only.
Zappos's $350 million project to bring its HQ from suburbia into downtown and revitalize downtown Las Vegas reimagines what an open floor plan office can be by opening itself up the entire community. It's inspired by the idea that companies become more productive when they collide with people and ideas in the broader community, and the entire plan is organized to facilitate interactions not just between employees, but within the community, from the placement of the buildings and public spaces, to the grassroots investment model and the community-oriented projects being funded.
In some ways, the Downtown Project is an experiment in taking the open floor plan office to its logical extreme. It blurs the distinction between companies in the same way that co-working does (no wonder co-working is a big part of the Downtown Project) by subsuming individuals into a broader community.
What's your take on open floor plan offices? How does your company balance work and play and openness and distinction? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Walter Chen is co-founder of iDoneThis, an ex-lawyer, and an amateur Starcraft player. You can follow his tweets at @smalter.
In the workplace, we rarely share what's going on beneath the surface. At most companies, the unspoken expectation is that you park your emotional life at the door, put on your game face, and keep things light and professional. In short, you bring a part of yourself to work and try to suppress the rest.
But at what cost — including to productivity?"—
Tony Schwartz, in an HBR blog post, Seeing Through Your Blind Spots, talks about how acknowledging and understanding our emotions in the workplace are important to how well we work.
Paying attention to feelings, of others and of ourselves, and improving our communication regarding these emotions helps us know how to work better. (We recommend maintaining a work diary to bring the rest of yourself to work!)
Cheers to mistakes! Here's the full quote about making mistakes from the excellent Neil Gaiman's blog, totally worth reading before you get back to doing:
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.
So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.
Make your mistakes, next year and forever.
NEWS FLASH: Everybody does not hate Mondays!
A recent Gallup poll found that workers who are engaged feel almost as good on the weekdays as they do on the weekends! Plus, learning and interestingness peaks for these happy, engaged workers during the workweek. In turn, they are more likely to be productive.
The bad news? Only 30% of U.S. workers were engaged in the first part of 2012.
How do we engage more of our employees? Here are some tactics from Katharine Esty and Mindy Gewirtz that help create a culture of employee engagement:
- Two-way communication between employees and management
- Trustworthy leaders
- Career development
- Employees' understanding of their job and role
- Shared decision making
What do you do in your workplace to engage your employees?


text:
Blogger profile: Sunny Hundal
We speak to Sunny Hundal, editor of left-liberal website, Liberal Conspiracy
Advertise with TotalPolitics
We speak to Sunny Hundal, editor of left-liberal website, Liberal Conspiracy
31 Mar 2014 11:57
The monarch – Liz. Her most powerful subject – Maggie. Two enduring icons born six months apart. One destined to rule, the other elected to lead. But when the stiff upper lip softened and the gloves came off, which one had the upper hand? Handbagged is the new political play that opens the clasp on the relationship between two giants of the 20th century.
Moira Buffini's comedy speculates on that most provocative of questions: What
by Anoosh Chakelian / 19 Mar 2014 16:45
1. There's an election on the horizon
We'd been told for days that this would be a highly political budget, and so it was. Tags are already flying around such as the Blue Rinse Budget and the Blue Collar Budget, as the chancellor has unashamedly announced some vote-seeking changes that will both benefit pensioners and woo the working-class vote. For the former, see the lifting of tax restrictions on how pensioners can access their pension pots,
10 Mar 2014 18:35
In Brendan's isolated pub on the west coast of Ireland, four men are gathering for a session, where their outlandish boasts are matched by their pints. The arrival of a stranger in their midst – a woman – spurs them to impress her with their ghostly story-telling. One story is more chilling and more real than any of the men could have foreseen.
When it first premièred in 1997, The Weir won the Evening Standard, Critics'
by Fiona O'Donnell MP / 07 Mar 2014 11:01
Saturday 8th March 2014 marks International Women's Day and women, and even some men, will want to mark it in some way. In Westminster MPs took part in debates highlighting the different conditions that women live and work under in different parts of the globe: a debate in Westminster Hall focussed on women in business while the main Commons chamber debated the security and rights of women in Afghanistan. Over 100 years have passed since
by Josh Zitser / 25 Feb 2014 13:57
"Under a recently announced scheme, low-income Conservative parliamentary candidates could be offered bursaries of up to £25,000 to help them win their seats. This extra funding accounts for about 63% of the costs needed to run a successful campaign. The aim of the scheme, therefore, seems to be to help those who are struggling financially to rise, regardless of their socioeconomic position, to the upper echelons of the party.
David Skelton, founder of Renewal –
by Sean Kippin / 25 Feb 2014 10:47
In a recent article for the Labour modernisers' house journal, Progress, the blogger and former Labour Party staffer Hopi Sen commented on the growing consensus within and without the Conservative Party that a Tory loss at the 2015 General Election would trigger the end of David Cameron's leadership. This may not be set in stone, but it is clear that a post-Downing Street Cameron would find it very difficult to lead his party
by Sean Kippin and Richard Berry / 29 Jan 2014 17:47
Since the implementation of the 2010 Wright Committee reforms, it has become an established fact of political life that select committees have become more visible and powerful. The reforms established elections for the members, and crucially, chairs, of committees for the first time. The way committees work is to listen to evidence from witnesses, who then inform the findings of their inquiries on policy areas across Government.
But who are these witnesses? While many are
by Nick Pickles / 27 Jan 2014 11:12
A serious debate about surveillance then isn't about shutting down the agencies or stopping surveillance. It is, however, essential to protecting our digital economy and our leadership on internet issues around the world.
Indeed, to justify inaction on the grounds that we may not have the worst oversight regime is missing the point. Trust is essential to foreign policy and digital businesses that have customers around the globe. The Snowden revelations have shone a
by Jane Roberts / 20 Jan 2014 13:38
Just as The Marmot Review demonstrated with compelling evidence that socio-economic inequalities have a very significant effect on the health outcomes of the population, recent analysis has suggested that as little as 20% of the influences on health are to do with clinical care. Yes, as low as 20%. Health behaviours account for 30% of influences and the physical environment for 10%, with socioeconomic factors having the largest impact on health at 40%. Even if
by Sean Kippin / 09 Jan 2014 16:19
What lies behind Ed Balls' recent display of niceness towards the Liberal Democrats? The recent softening of tone when senior Labour figures discuss the Party, and vice versa, suggests a deliberate strategy on both sides to avoid pre-emptively burn bridges between the two parties. In advance of potential negotiations in the wake of another hung parliament after the 2015 election, this is probably wise.
While the prospect of a Lab-Lib coalition would have been

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Latest Posts
Bright Idea: Four Ways to Engage At-Risk Youth in Community Service
April 16, 2014
We talk to youth-service experts about engaging at-risk young people in community service.
Bright Idea: Dallas High Schools Open Early as Drop-In Centers
April 15, 2014
Three Dallas-area high schools have started opening early once a week to provide supplies and services to youth who need them.
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Published for Federal Runaway and Homeless Youth Program
April 14, 2014
The public is invited to comment on proposed regulations for the Family & Youth Services Bureau's Runaway and Homeless Youth Program, published this month in the Federal Register.
A Research-Based Guide to Helping Teens Deal With Drug Abuse
April 10, 2014
People are most likely to begin abusing drugs—and that includes tobacco, alcohol, and illegal and prescription drugs—as teens and young adults. Learn about ways to help teens struggling with addiction from a new guide by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Start a Youth Program
Do you dream of launching a youth-serving nonprofit? We have the recipe for success in our "Guide to Starting a Youth Program."


text:
10 burning questions heading into 2011-12 college hoops season
Story Highlights
Expect college hoops to win some converts if the NBA lockout continues this winter
This year's cinderella story? The Belmont Bruins could become 2011-12's VCU
No college player has more raw talent than UConn freshman Andre Drummond
Zen Hoop Thought: If someone realizes how immature he is, does that not make him uncommonly mature?
If you think the answer is yes, then you are going to love the 2011-12 college basketball season. We are conditioned to expect every underclassmen to leap at the chance to be an NBA first-round draft pick, yet last spring a surprising number of uncommonly mature young men decided to return to school. North Carolina's Harrison Barnes, Ohio State's Jared Sullinger and Baylor's Perry Jones III all turned down the chance to be top-five picks. A host of other potential first-rounders came back as well, most notably UConn guard Jeremy Lamb, Kentucky forward Terrence Jones, North Carolina forwards Tyler Zeller and John Henson, Xavier guard Tu Holloway and Vanderbilt guard John Jenkins. That means we're headed for an uncommonly exciting season -- and we haven't even reached the start of practice.
That start arrives Friday night with the unfurling of the colorful, national spectacle known as Midnight Madness. College basketball still does not have an appropriate opening day for games, but it sure begins practice better than anyone. So as the Madness gets underway, your resident Hoop Thinker is once again on hand to present the 10 most burning questions I'm eager to see answered this season.
So step right up and feel the heat. Uncommon maturity not required.
How is the average diehard NBA fan going to spend this winter if the lockout doesn't end? Spend more time with his wife and kids? Take piano lessons? Read? Volunteer?
Please. He's gonna watch basketball and there will only be one place for him to turn. So the question is not whether college hoops will benefit, but by how much, and in what ways. Will we see a bump in TV ratings? Will attendance figures climb? Will there be more media coverage due to the vacuum left on the evening news and in the local newspaper? (Note to kids: Ask your parents what a newspaper is.) Maybe the benefit will manifest itself in that hard-to-measure but eminently critical category of buzz.
I love the NBA, but it is serendipitous that the work stoppage is occurring at a time when college hoops is flush with marquee players. So I expect this sport to win a lot of converts this winter, and I hope they'll stick around long after the lockout has ended.
It was truly incredible that in the very first expanded NCAA tournament in 26 years, Shaka Smart's VCU Rams made it all the way from the First Four to the Final Four. Could it possibly happen again this season?
It's doubtful, of course, but there's no shortage of candidates. For starters, I've got my eye on two teams from the Missouri Valley. Creighton boasts arguably the best player in all of midmajordom, 6-foot-7 sophomore forward Doug McDermott, whose father, Greg, is the Bluejays' coach. McDermott is not quite Jimmerific, but he's a heady, versatile scorer who shined over the summer for USA Basketball at the Under-19 world championships. Meanwhile, Gregg Marshall's Wichita State Shockers lost several starters from the group that won the NIT, but he has been stockpiling talent for years and his program is bound to break through sometime soon.
Elsewhere, Harvard brings its entire roster back from the team that came within a fallaway buzzer beater of reaching its first NCAA tournament in 65 years, and Detroit has an excellent chance to unseat Butler in the Horizon League thanks to the presence of 6-1 sophomore guard Ray McCallum, Jr. But the hands-down, set-your-DVR mid-major to watch this season is Belmont. Rick Byrd's Bruins play an exciting, up-tempo style that last year saw 11 players average at least 10 minutes per game. Belmont won 30 times and prevailed in the Atlantic Sun championship game by 41 points before bowing out to Wisconsin in the NCAA first round. That experience will be a boon for the nine players among those 11 who are back this season.
Belmont won't be easy to find on the tube, so be sure to give them a gander on Nov. 11. That's when the Bruins open the season at Duke. We won't have to wait long to see whether this team has the chops to pull a VCU next March.
I'm not sure the average college basketball fan -- or even the diehard fan -- is totally aware of the record Jamie Dixon has assembled. Over the last decade he has coached Pitt to eight straight NCAA tournaments, earned two No. 1 seeds, won three Big East titles and accrued the highest win percentage (.708) in league games of any coach in Big East history.
Yet, as Dixon is no doubt tired of hearing, his program has still never made it to the Final Four, and it is finding ever more creative ways to keep from getting there. In 2009, the Panthers reached the Elite Eight for the first time, only to lose on a last-second mad dash by Villanova guard Scotty Reynolds. When last year's tournament ended in the second round with that bizarre foul fest against Butler, it marked the third consecutive season that Pitt lost a game in the tournament by three points or fewer. You've heard of Team Heartbreak? This is Team Snakebite.
Is this the year Pitt finally is the biter instead of the bite-ee? Well ... why not? The Panthers are a much more likely candidate to win an NCAA title than UConn appeared to be entering last season. We usually think of the Panthers as a bunch of underrecruited overachievers, but this season the team will be anchored inside by two former McDonald's All Americans in 6-9 junior Dante Taylor and 6-9 freshman Khem Birch, who is arguably the best player Dixon has ever recruited. Throw in a veteran backcourt led by Ashton Gibbs and Travon Woodall and Pitt looks like a Final Four team -- again. All they need is a little more snake oil.
Or to rephrase: Who is Kentucky's best player? John Calipari has brought in his usual stellar haul in 6-10 forward Anthony Davis, 6-6 forward Michael Gilchrist and 6-2 point guard Marquis Teague. (The fact that Calipari swiped Teague from right under Rick Pitino's nose was a nice little bonus.) Those three could split the balloting when it comes time to vote for national freshman of the year, but that award pales next to the opportunity to win a national championship.
Freshman watching is always fun in college hoops, but this season features a particularly watchable crop. Uber-scorer Austin Rivers will step into the starting backcourt at Duke with the greenest of green lights. Point guard Josiah Turner (Arizona), shooting guard Bradley Beal (Florida), power forward Cody Zeller (Indiana), small forward Quincy Miller (Baylor) and power forward LeBryan Nash (Oklahoma State) will all have similar opportunities to make an immediate impact.
The smart money is on Rivers or Davis, but nobody ever accused me of being overly smart. So I'm going with the late addition at UConn, 6-11 center Andre Drummond. He isn't as offensively polished as the other top candidates, but he has the power and athleticism to dominate on the defensive end. He's also a good passer with a high basketball IQ, which means he could improve quickly. Yes, it helps to be old in college basketball -- especially during the tournament -- but talent still trumps experience. And no player in America has more pure talent than Andre Drummond.
Remember that embarrassing fight that occurred two years ago between members of the Kansas football and basketball teams? You might not have heard about it if Taylor, a 6-3 guard, hadn't revealed on his Facebook page that he had dislocated a finger in the skirmish. Four months later, Taylor again took to Facebook to voice frustration over reduced playing time and suggested he might transfer. His decision-making on the court hasn't been much better, which helps explain why Kansas has exited the last two NCAA tournaments earlier than it should have.
Taylor is back for his senior season, and I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt that he has learned his lesson. But it's only a matter of time before another player does something foolish from behind his laptop. College students have always said and done stupid things (present company included), but in the past those transgressions were committed in private. Now all the world is a computer screen, so it's not a question of whether someone else will write something regrettable. It's only a matter of who and when.
Patrick Kane scores game-winner in OT to lead Blackhawks past Blues
Stars recover from slow start, beat Ducks to tie up series


text:
The Mission Fire Department will host a pancake breakfast and open house from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 28.
Breakfast will be served for free from 8 a.m. to noon. Donations will be accepted.
There will be activities for kids, including a bounce house. The community can meet local firefighters and see fire trucks.


text:
The second bonus track, "The Apostle's Creed," features an underscore of the final hymn as kids will recite the creed. Art Kids can translate the creed to faux stained glass windows and Media Kid's can program it to power point to lead the audience in this timeless statement of faith.
Voicing: spoken
Performance Time: 1:13
The crucifixion in John 19 leads to a "rock" resurrection as Jesus removes the stone to escape the grave! "The ROCK That Rolled the Stone" expresses joy and hope with a rollicking hand-jive to this new song by Kathie Hill. Worship activities help kids explore Jesus as the "rock of our salvation," "the capstone," and "cornerstone" of our faith through scripture memorization and art projects.
WAM! 4 Kids 4 the Word is the 2nd of Worship Arts and Music resources from Kathie Hill Music. With tracks by Denver Bierman and the Mile High Orchestra, WAM! 4 Kids 4 the Word features seven songs to present separately or collectively in a Worship Arts Celebration. An optional script provides narrations that follow the life of Christ according to the book of John. Narrations are performed on the Listening CD. (The script is included with the bundled 7 song set of Vocal Charts only.)
Voicing: Unison/2 part (1 solo)
Performance Time: 2:34
There is no manufactured product to ship. Using instructions provided you immediately download master files to your computer - PDFs to print, MP3s to burn to CD or play from an iPod or computer, or video (WMVs) to burn to a data DVD or play from your computer. Then make copies equal to the number of licenses purchased (ie, one 5x license = 5 copies). Upon payment, log into your KathieHillMusic.com ACCOUNT to download your masters. A broadband connection is recommended and files to print face plates and sequence inserts are provided.
NOTE: Your honesty in making copies equal to your paid licenses will dictate whether we can continue this service.
This product was added to our catalog on Tuesday 29 January, 2008.